In the mid-1990s, a few pharmaceutical companies made broad claims regarding the safety and efficacy of opioid medications for pain management. These claims were based on limited research that did not fully account for these drugs’ potentially ha…
Category: Conditions
Is my headache coming from my soul?
Serious soul searching can give anybody a headache, but when a young woman asked me that, I was taken aback in my neurosurgery clinic. Huh? I said. Do you know René Descartes? The pineal gland is the “seat of the soul.” Well, my pineal gland has a cyst…
Physicians are an underserved population about their own mental health care
COVID-19 has shed light on a pre-existing condition in medicine – our health care system has failed to tend to its workforce’s well-being. While generally privileged, physicians are an underserved population about their own mental health care. Nu…
Trauma is ever-present in the practice of medicine
Some forms of trauma are obvious: natural disasters like earthquakes, floods, fires, being physically assaulted, wrongfully terminated, becoming suddenly very ill. Trauma is divided into so-called big T and little t experiences, but the distinction is …
Extreme athleticism and the risk of atrial fibrillation
Consider the following sports icons: tennis legend Billie Jean King, basketball veteran Larry Bird, triathlete Karsten Madsen, baseball pitcher Kenley Jansen, and cyclist champion Haimar Zubeldia. What do all of these well-known professional athlete h…
Getting the COVID vaccine: a behind the scenes look
Don’t let images deceive you. You may think you see everything in my picture after getting the vaccine, but you don’t. Let me take you behind the scenes of my life this past year. As I can only imagine what being behind the scenes of your life has been…
COVID vaccines: side effects, myths, and madness
I received my COVID vaccine on December 21st before starting an ER shift; sitting in the cold, plastic chair in a hallway-turned-vaccine-clinic, I tipped my head back to blink tears into submission as I reflected on making it this far in the pandemic w…
How the vaccinated may become the next super-spreaders
With COVID-19 vaccines being administered to our front-line health care workers and residents of long-term care facilities, we are beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel of this pandemic. Yet, given the time-limited nature of the vaccine&#…
Can we stop wasting the COVID-19 vaccine?
As I write today, COVID-19 has killed more than 380,000 people in the United States. The country is averaging close to 200,000 cases per day and has a record number of patients hospitalized at this time. This trend shows no signs of abating. Unfortunat…
Burials: We can’t keep up
Those were the headlines in one of the Sunday papers. He was around fifty years old and with his wife. They stood in front of me in the supermarket. He was in shorts and a light blue t-shirt, wearing beach flip-flops. Standard casual wear for the holid…
